A new major update is underway, and I will try to not spoil it for you, but some noteworthy changes were shipped already. The update is going to be quite technical, if you don’t like that, skip the walls of text to get to the second half.
Room / Section detection rewrite
After releasing the major update, I decided to regroup and do an iteration of technical changes. Cleaning up the technical debt that inevitably accumulates over time is very important for a long term project like this one. Some systems that were created early proved to be not as efficient or flexible as they could have been. One of these systems was the Room / Section detection. It worked well with smaller ships, but some of you like them jaw-droppingly big, and every time floors or walls would change on a huge ship, all the rooms and sections had to be reevaluated. Depending on the CPU load, this could take up to 1 second, which is forever in computing terms.
A full rewrite made the room change detection so fast that I don’t even have to run it in the background across multiple frames anymore. You may notice a significantly faster ship generation when starting a new game, this is thanks to this rewrite. The performance boost is also noticeable when you have a large amount of ongoing construction that makes the rooms / sections to constantly reevaluate.
Pathfinding rewrite
After getting my hands dirty with Room / Section rewrite, I decided to take a stab at the most annoying system I had - pathfinding. The system was rewritten from scratch to get a whopping performance increase of up to 1000x for most pathfinding queries. Previously some more complex path requests could take as much as 500ms to get executed in a background thread, which would stall the workers as they were waiting for a pathfinding result. This was especially noticeable at 10x speed with a large number of workers. Now pathfinding runs so fast that it is virtually immediate. This also significantly reduced the overall CPU consumption and gave more breathing room for other CPU intensive tasks.
Additionally, this rewrite forced me to go through tons of code and change it to adapt to the new, more strict API. Due to the extreme speed-up and the additional validations, I’ve found and fixed numerous race conditions and edge cases that may have caused some weird situations that could lead to undefined behaviors.
If you had any issues with performance before, now is the time to reevaluate the experience.
Lights system rewrite
This is the last large rewrite I did before the next major update, I promise!
Light rendering was something I wasn’t happy about. It involved two different cameras and two sprites per light source, and often looked weird when there were multiple light sources close to each other, and there was not enough control over how lights were blending with each other. The old light system also had an upfront performance cost, where a small number of lights would be as expensive as a large number of lights, which made the game run a few FPS slower on lower-end hardware.
The new light system eliminates the cameras and sprites, and instead uses a small data structure for each light source, which makes it faster and more lightweight for small amounts of lights, yet still robust and powerful enough to drive thousands of real-time colorful light sources with two-color pulse and dynamic positioning. My tests show a 20% performance increase with high-end GPU at extreme number of lights (5000+).
In addition to this, the light sources have received a “range” slider, where you can adjust the range of any configurable light source. The electricity cost will reflect the light range.
And the Video settings panel has a bunch of new controls for the new lights system, including the overall light intensity and some performance related settings which should remain on “Auto” unless you want to mess around to get a few extra FPS.
Landing Zones
Stasis Pods and Storage Capsules used to drop anywhere on the ship, even if the area was fully enclosed and oxygenated. That was immersion breaking, and now this behavior had an overhaul. Since recently, Stasis Pods and Storage Capsules will only target unenclosed areas. Make sure you have at least 100 tiles of what is now considered a “Landing Zone”, or the incoming pods will ram your outer ship walls due to lack of space for proper landing. No more landing through the roof though!
Real-time nebulas for everyone
I love the beautiful real-time nebulas that float when you fly, but unfortunately they were so taxing on the GPU that I kept them off by default, hidden behind a video setting with “unoptimized” in the label. Well, not anymore! I have reworked the visual effect that produces realtime nebulas and removed the most expensive processing that gave only slight visual improvement. Now simple real-time nebulas are the new default, and for a good reason - read on.
Ship rotation
Since I’ve been focusing on increasing player immersion, I finally did a thing that was suggested by a few of you before. When you pick a destination in the starmap, the ship will have to rotate and align itself with the target before flying. The rotation will be visible in the game view, and it will look glorious with real-time nebulas! This also adds a new mechanic - when you have to escape incoming asteroids, you will likely have to pick a place that is aligned with your current rotation, or you will lose precious time reorienting your ship.
While for now no changes are needed for the engine configuration, I will consider adding dedicated thrusters that will be required for rotating the ship.
The little things
There’s a ton of other smaller changes that shipped since the Derelict Ships update, here’s a few of my favorites:
Two new plants you can grow: Poppy and Cornflower. The products you can harvest from these plants will be used for something special that will be added in the next major update!
Thin version of walls. Those required some special changes for the lights rendering to look good, but now you can make your colonists hear each other snore. Just think of all the steel plates you’ll save!
Plan Move tool. Since you can use precision thrusters to move your ship around in the local map, the plan had to become movable as well! You can find the plan move tool in Plan (“L”) radial menu’s second page. Also, when you’re drawing your plan, holding Ctrl + Shift + Alt will let you click and drag the plan to move it immediately.
Pets can now sleep in Armchairs! (Yes, the raider-leather ones)
Loading icon will show an animated drone holding a “Wait!” sign instead of a rotating cog. This is probably my favorite change ever.
Rooms overlay (F9) will show tooltips with contents of each room when you hover the room list.
Dust storm particles will not show up inside enclosed areas. This is a subtle little graphics change, but a very pleasant one, adding to the immersive experience.
Flying between galaxies will display FTL trails.
Pixel Art mode! Go to Settings > Video > Texture Quality and choose “Pixel Art” or “Low Budget Pixel Art” to get a nostalgic retro art style.
That’s it for now, the next update will be a major one!
The full changelog: https://stardeusgame.com/changelog Search for "v0.7.0 (2023.01.23)" and scroll up to read through what exactly has been done since the major update.
First of all: If you are thinking about starting a new game - now might be the time! This patch change a lot of the in-game balances and should make the overall experience way more balanced, challenging and fun!
This patch adds the following: - Perks have been changed so many of them are rankable and will increase in rank when used. For example dodging will increase the perk dodge, and each increased rank makes it more likely that attacks are dodged. Dark siphon is now ranked and gives +1 to dark power for each rank. This perk gets its rank increased by finding and using dark altars. - New perks: Aimed Arc - fire great distances but with low accuracy with bows. Weapon proficiency - deal extra damage with a perticular weapon. Dark bolt - a ranged magic attack. Smite - a ranged magic attack used by Paladins. - It is now possible to view the walkable grid, both indoors and outdoors. - A new animal: giant rats, which can found in animal burrows when mining. - It is now possible to change the looks of the interface, allowing for a more tailor made experience.
This patch changes the following: - Greatly improves the performance of the peon-search-for-items-to-store function, which previously could cause horrible lag. - When searching for food, villagers will take into account the quality and source of food. If starving villagers will also eat raw food, resulting in poison damage. - Improves a few animation, mainly the over-head-swing when mining, chopping wood or attacking with two handed weapons. (Looks waaay prettier now!) - Over all loot, trader items and drops from enemies have been balanced and there is now a chance of finding much higher quality gear. - Over all balanced attackers, making early attacks easier and later attacks more difficult. - When starting a new faction, the first event will always be a lone visitor. Also, in the first three weeks if your population is low, lone visitor events have a higher probablity of occuring. - When blocking, deflecting or parrying an attack, extra damage will NOT be applied (like poison or fire damage), making shields and armor much more efficient. - When creating a new faction and editing the units, its now possible to see the starting perks. - Improved attackers AI. - Improved the zoom function when clicking on news. - Improves news messages relating to work not being finished. - Gets rid of a few crashes, bugs and other inconviences. - And many more tiny fixes and improvements which I am blanking on at the moment!
There is probably some edge cases I have missed, and if so: Please let me know how it works - I stand very ready for hot fixes!
As always: a billion thanks for the feedback, bug reporting and the encouraging and kind words! And sorry for all the bugs! Please keep the feedback coming so I can make this game as enjoyable as possible!
Best wishes and all the love! <3 //Mattias
PS: There has also been reports about corrupted save files. I am REALLY sorry about those. These occur when the game crashes while saving. I am doing my best to make sure these don't happen at all, since it is often impossible to recover saves if the damage is too great.
The Kriegsfront universe is expanding more than ever, We are here to bring you a brand-new devlog series discussing all you know about Kriegsfront Tactics.
This devlog is a behind-the-scenes series about the game development process of Kriegsfront Tactics, a grounded turn-based mecha tactics game set in an alternate world in 1970s Southeast Asia and inspired by classic titles such as Front Mission and Patlabor. As more updates are coming soon later this year, we'll be sharing tweaks, insights, and stories to keep our fans in the loop and keep up the hype. We would love to share many things with you, so you can know how dedicated we are to this project and bringing you the grounded mecha turn-based tactics we envisioned in 2018.
In the first episode, Kris Antoni, the Game Director of Kriegsfront Tactics, will explore the basic foundation of the game that is comprehensible to our fans. Kris also serves as the founder of Toge Productions, an indie game development studio from Indonesia. Our humble beginnings that have garnered many fans from different parts of the world have enabled us to create new games and explore different genres, to the point we are now as we continue to develop Kriegsfront Tactics.
Watch the first episode here to find out more!
The first episode consists of an introduction by our game director, and how Kriegsfront Tactics came to be realized in the first place. You will know our game design pillars, inspiration, what's to come for the future, and why we are creating a turn-based mecha tactics game. You might discover new ideas about Kriegsfront Tactics, so be sure to watch the devlog until the end.
Kris also will showcase the current progress and features of Kriegsfront Tactics and share some game development tips & tricks we have learned while developing the game. There are five topics to be covered in the first episode: 1. Introduction 2. Background 3. Game Design 4. Visual Style 5. Roadmap
If you want to see more of the Kriegsfront Tactics devlog, be sure to follow us! Do you have anything in mind about other relevant topics you might be interested in? Please feel free to comment down below.
Kriegsfront Battlescaper - Diorama Editor - Mr. Kashuur
Salute, Pilots!
The Kriegsfront universe is expanding more than ever, We are here to bring you a brand-new devlog series discussing all you know about Kriegsfront Tactics.
This devlog is a behind-the-scenes series about the game development process of Kriegsfront Tactics, a grounded turn-based mecha tactics game set in an alternate world in 1970s Southeast Asia and inspired by classic titles such as Front Mission and Patlabor. As more updates are coming soon later this year, we'll be sharing tweaks, insights, and stories to keep our fans in the loop and keep up the hype. We would love to share many things with you, so you can know how dedicated we are to this project and bringing you the grounded mecha turn-based tactics we envisioned in 2018.
In the first episode, Kris Antoni, the Game Director of Kriegsfront Tactics, will explore the basic foundation of the game that is comprehensible to our fans. Kris also serves as the founder of Toge Productions, an indie game development studio from Indonesia. Our humble beginnings that have garnered many fans from different parts of the world have enabled us to create new games and explore different genres, to the point we are now as we continue to develop Kriegsfront Tactics.
Watch the first episode here to find out more!
The first episode consists of an introduction by our game director, and how Kriegsfront Tactics came to be realized in the first place. You will know our game design pillars, inspiration, what's to come for the future, and why we are creating a turn-based mecha tactics game. You might discover new ideas about Kriegsfront Tactics, so be sure to watch the devlog until the end.
Kris also will showcase the current progress and features of Kriegsfront Tactics and share some game development tips & tricks we have learned while developing the game. There are five topics to be covered in the first episode: 1. Introduction 2. Background 3. Game Design 4. Visual Style 5. Roadmap
If you want to see more of the Kriegsfront Tactics devlog, be sure to follow us! Do you have anything in mind about other relevant topics you might be interested in? Please feel free to comment down below.
We're thrilled to announce that we have our new dev's monthly selection of your amazing mods 🙂
1. Best Season 9 Ready Mod: This rewards mod which embodies the Season 9's spirit the most. 2. Best New Vehicle: The devs will pick a recent mod which has the most impressive model to them, based on both look and gameplay. 3. Best Map: The map that our devs liked the most, based on their design, flow, aesthetics and gameplay.
Like always, it's difficult to choose only three of many wonderful mods on https://mod.io/ ; so we invite you to check all the beautiful creation on the SnowRunner page made by SnowRunners ❄
The following are the events that will be available for the game starting today!
1. Battle Pass Spring Part 1
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 4/4 23:59 PDT
Spring is here and so is Battle Pass!
Get the battle pass now for fresh challenges, rewards, and brand new outfits!
Reach new levels and earn exclusive rewards, including the Doll Flower Play outfit by completing all missions!
Join the battles now and show off your skills! We've also prepared a preview of the battle pass spring outfits.
2. Battle Pass Spring Part 1 Bundle
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 4/4 23:59 PDT
Here comes the spring part 1 Battle Pass bundle with new missions!
Start off faster than others! Get 420 badges instantly!
Reach Battle Pass Lv.15 as soon as you get the bundle!
Meet Exclusive Doll Flower Play lemon hair and Orange Line outfit upon purchase and complete missions!
3. Special Lounge Battle Badge Package
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 4/4 23:59 PDT
Visit FS lounge and meet new Battle Badge packages!
You can reach Lv.15 upon purchase with 420 badges!
With 720 badges, reach Lv.25 and complete battle missions in no time!
4. Platinum Kennel Sale with higher chance!
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 3/14 23:59 PDT
Special platinum kennel with max 30% off price!
Newly updated pet Mini Pig, Kappa, and Monkey are included with special pick up rate!
Get 3x pick up rate for purchasing kennel bundle!
Don’t miss this chance to meet new pets!
[Pet Info]
[Kennel Rate]
[Bundle Rate]
5. Journey To The West Shopping Bag
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 3/21 23:59 PDT
Welcome, fellow travelers, to the Journey to the West themed outfit!
Get ready to embark on a fashion journey that will transport you to the mythical realm of the Monkey king and his companions!
6. 3vs3 Mode 1/3/4 Mission Event
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 3/21 23:59 PDT
Play 3vs3 mode and win free rewards!
Mission resets on every 00:00 PDT!
7. 1vs1 Mode 1/2/3 Mission Event
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 3/21 23:59 PDT
Play 1vs1 mode and win free rewards!
Mission resets on every 00:00 PDT!
8. St. Patrick’s Outfit Package!
Event Period: 3/8 00:00 ~ 3/21 23:59 PDT
Get ready to shamrock and roll with our St. Patrick’s Day outfit sale!
This limited-time offer is packed with all sorts of green and gold gear to make you the envy of the court!
9. March Best Streamer Event
Upload your best play or any kind related to 3on3FreeStyle and get a chance to have your clip on our official Channel!
And for extra, get a specially made Streamer’s Nametag and some good amount of Points as well!
Reach 2K views to become 3on3 Best Streamer!
Most Viewed Video will be added to the 3on3 Playlist!
Posting Period: 3/1 – 3/31 23:59 PDT
Streamers will be announced on the 3on3FreeStyle Official Website.
Event Mechanics:
**Only those with the ‘3on3FreeStyle’ Keyword will count as potential candidates. **Please show your PSN ID/Gamertag/SteamID in your clip for the rewards. **Only those on YouTube will be counted. YouTube Shorts are not counted. **If you post multiple, the posting with the most view count will be counted. **The clip doesn’t need to be Live streaming, it can be recorded clips. **Streamer’s Event will continue next month as well! **If you achieve the same streamer grade, only coins/points reward will be given